Industrial Structure Information Blog

Tag Archives: elevated structure

Mezzanine supported modular office with a two-wall modular building below

Whether you’re running out of room on the plant floor or need to oversee production, mezzanines are commonly employed to support and elevate modular buildings. Recently we received some great photos back on a project we completed last month for a mezzanine supported modular office that I thought you might like to see. The customer was located right here in Northeast Ohio. They were putting in a new line on the plant floor and needed to tear down some offices they had in order to make room. There wasn’t enough space to relocate the offices elsewhere on the plant floor, so they decided to utilize some of their unused overhead space.

A 9’ high mezzanine supported modular office with an 8’ high modular wall system below.

When thinking on putting in a mezzanine supported modular building, it’s important to consider just how much space is available. Remember that with typical column spans in low seismic areas, you’ll probably lose 1’3” to 1’5” for the mezzanine itself. If you plan on having people move through the area you will need to maintain a minimum of 7’ for clearance. The modular building panels are typically 8’ or 9’ tall, and unless you are planning on supporting them by the structure above, you will probably want about a foot more in order to install the roof deck to the panels which helps form the membrane that holds the system together. In this particular case the customer’s mezzanine had a clearance height of 8’7” with a 9’10” top of deck. This provided us enough room to install a modular office above (9’ tall panels, 9’3-1/8” overall height, 8’6” clearance height) and an 8’ high (8’3-1/8” overall with a 7’6” clear ceiling height) modular wall system below.

While designing these mezzanine supported modular offices, we’re often asked if we can utilize the adjacent existing walls. While this is commonly done on the main floor of a facility, unfortunately we cannot do this up on top of the mezzanine deck. There will always be some movement and vibrations on top of an elevated structure and because of this the structure would need to be a four wall system and not tie into the adjacent walls. In this particular care, we put in a four wall system above the mezzanine deck as well as a two wall system below the deck to create an enclosed pass way between the production floor, the front offices beyond the cinder block wall, and the production floor entrance way to the outside.

Two wall modular wall system below the mezzanine

It took our installers 6 work days to unload and install (both mechanical and electrical) the 24’x10’ mezzanine, the 24’x10’ 4-wall modular office above, and the 9’x22’9” two wall modular wall system below, and we had yet another very happy customer.